(I posted an earlier version of this article on 18 April 2025. This version is significantly updated.)
I posted the article Adiós, amigos! on 18 May 2023.
On 27 June 2023 I sent an email to everyone on the NZ Wealth & Risk mailing list stating that I’m winding up the NZ Wealth & Risk blog, and wasn’t sure whether I’d come back to it or send any future emails.
Until that point, I had been posting regularly to the blog for about 10 years. I’d developed a cadence publishing a new article every Friday at 8am for years. I’d been sending monthly emails to subscribers on the NZ Wealth & Risk mailing list since May of 2017.
In my June 2023 email I also mentioned that I was intending to wind up Fairhaven Wealth. In October that year, I formalised this by sending an email to all past clients to let them know.
Since then, I haven’t really been “working” in the professional sense. My main role has been to manage my household, which has included helping family members with some unique and idiosyncratic tasks and challenges.
In this article, I thought I’d provide a snapshot of how things have gone, personally and professionally, and also what the future holds.
Personally
The choice to stop working wasn’t one that I wanted to make, in any sense that it would make me happy or even thrive in the short-term. It was a choice I needed to make, for the sake of more important values and priorities than my own short-term hedonic pleasure.
I touched on this in an article I published on 3 March 2023, explaining that living in line with your values and priorities isn’t always easy.
In that article I said that “I’m glad that 2022 has ended”. As I wrote that, I was already exhausted.
What I didn’t realise that I was heading into another set of challenges, and that the rest of 2023 would be the most challenging period of my life.
It felt like I had just finished a marathon, and had no gas in the tank, but that I had to run another marathon – with much higher stakes.
I won’t go into specifics. But as bad as 2022 was, 2023 was our family’s annus horribilis. It was a year of deep lows, of physical and emotional exhaustion.
I write this in 2025. Things have improved enormously. 2024 was better than 2023. I caught up with a friend recently, and remarked that 2025 has been a “good” year (in a qualified sense). It struck me that this was the first time I’ve said that in a long, long time.
I also write this with enormous gratitude. For all the challenges we faced, things have turned out pretty well. Our physical and mental health is back, or at least heading in the right trajectory.
As is often the case, there is also a silver lining. It’s conceivable that, because of everything we’ve been through, the rest of our lives will be better because of the challenges we’ve faced.
My wife and I still like each other! I can imagine many other couples not surviving this sort of period. I have a deeper relationship of trust and candour with both of my children, and they are both doing well, in their own unique ways.
I am also incredibly grateful for the position that I’m in, in the sense that I was able to take time off work to focus on these other challenges. We had the resources to seek support and assistance that isn’t available to many other people.
Not everyone can do this, and it breaks my heart.
One thing that helped me was the understanding that life has chapters and seasons. Many of these chapters and seasons are good. But even in the most blessed life, some won’t be. As I had written previously: the question isn’t whether, but when.
I would often remind myself that some experiences can be painful to get through, but they are only part of a larger story.
Professionally
Realistically, I tried to keep things going with Fairhaven Wealth longer than I should have. The final nail in the coffin was when I realised that I couldn’t schedule meetings without the risk of having to cancel or postpone at very short notice (sometimes 5 minutes beforehand). I also didn’t know whether and when I would get an extended stretch of time to actually do work (while also having the energy to take advantage of that time). It just wasn’t going to work.
Since early- to mid-2023 I’ve done a small amount of work for former Fairhaven Wealth clients, and one or two consulting-related odd jobs. I retained my authorisations to provide advice, just in case. But I feel like it’s not inaccurate to say that I haven’t been “working” in a formal or professional sense.
All else being equal, this wasn’t a choice I wanted to make.
I like working! I like the feeling of interacting with people and adding value to other people’s lives. I find it rewarding. I enjoy the intellectual stimulation and challenge. A long time ago, I wrote that I want to die with my boots on. And that remains the case.
(I also realised just how much I like having financial slack/disposable income! But that’s another article for another time.)
… but I can’t sit still
Having said this, I’m not the sort of person who can sit down and just play video games or watch movies (even at 7x speed!). I struggle to sit down, and to the extent possible, I feel like I have to be doing something.
A good portion of this energy has gone into navigating beauracracy, deep-diving into topics I never thought I’d have to learn about. For example, I now know more about the New Zealand educational system (specifically, the NZ Curriculum) in far more detail and granularity than I otherwise would have.
We’ve also undertaken some large renovation projects – including a complete kitchen fit-out – which took up quite a bit of mental bandwidth.
I’ve also been able to work on various projects when I’ve been able to Tetris in the time. In that spirit, when people ask what I do, my common answer is that I’m a “professional dilletante”. That has kind of been the case. I’ve gone down quite a few rabbit holes. Like 3D printing, playing around with microcontrollers (Arduino/ESP32), learning electric guitar, and being handy: fixing stuff, painting, woodworking, gardening.
But more than anything else, I’ve been…
Going down the AI rabbit hole
By the time I stopped writing, I had already started to go down the AI rabbit hole. I wrote quite a few articles on the topic at the time. For example:
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Thoughts on AI and financial advice (April 2023) – where I shared “two strong opinions (weakly held)”. For one, that limitations to AI providing financial advice won’t be technological so much as limited by other factors, such as regulatory issues and actual implementation. For another, I expressed the view that “there won’t be a single AI that serves everybody” – in the context of financial advice, “there will be different models that provide different advice in different ways, and it will be a competitive market”.
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AI, red herrings, and Superman vs Voldemort. Debates about defining “intelligence” and whether AI systems can be conscious are red herrings in terms of what we should be focusing on.
My thoughts and feelings on those topics are directionally the same.
I’d also shared some ways I had been using AI at the time. One was on using AI for getting writing feedback (and feedback on my ideas more generally: if you can get past the sycophancy, they are great tools for thinking). Other examples included getting help to make complex purchasing decisions, getting tech support, nerding out on pop-culture stuff that no one else seemed to be interested in; getting an external perspective on heated conversations with a loved one. I’ve found many other uses since then.
One description I heard recently is that although AI can be useful for people with a lot of domain knowledge, where it really shines is helping out in areas where you have less knowledge and experience. It can accelerate the learning process enormously, and in my case open the door for working on projects that were previously impractical – like coding and software design.
What next?
I published an earlier version of this article in April, and my immediate answer as: “Who knows!!?”
However, as 2025 has progressed, I now have a pretty good idea about what I want to do, and I feel like this justified updating this article.
At the time I was thinking about returning to Fairhaven Wealth. I had envisioned an updated service offering, at a higher price point, with the full knowledge that the service wouldn’t be suitable for everyone (or most people, really). However, I’ve changed my mind.
What I am going to do is focus on building software tools for people, under the business name Future Friends Software.
At the time of publishing this updated article, the Future Friends website is operational and I am actively promoting two apps.
One of these apps is free. It is a web-based app called Flawcastr.
Another app, which I’m making available for pre-sale, is called Snoopy. It lets you (and only you!!) “snoop” through your financial transactions and get a really good sense of where your money comes and goes.
In a lot of respects Future Friends shares a lot of the DNA that informed Fairhaven Wealth and this blog. I still care about business models and avoiding dark patterns. I still care about the consumer. In both Flawcastr and Snoopy, for instance, none of your financial information gets shared with me. All calculations and data is saved on your own computer.
Snoopy is not going to be a subscription-based piece of software. It is a piece of software that you will pay for once for any given device, and that will be it.
Flawcastr in the browser is free, and my intention is for this to remain the case forever. I might offer a more advanced version of Flawcastr in the future, with additional features, but I intend to keep the basic functionality still free.
See you soon!
The last few years have been a stark reminder that life happens in seasons, some harder than others. But through it all, I’m immensely grateful for the lessons learned and the chance to build something new. It’s often from our worst experiences that the best things can grow, and I’m hopeful that Future Friends Software is a significant part of the next chapter of that story.
This blog has always been my favorite way to share ideas, and as I start this new chapter with Future Friends Software, I expect you’ll be hearing from me more regularly. Thank you for following along on the journey. I’m looking forward to what’s next.